Gestalt
Psychology

"Gestalt theory
began toward the close of the 19th century in Austriaand south Germany as
a protest against associationist and structural schools' piecemeal
analysis of experience into atomistic
elements." Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang
Köhler and Kurt Koffka
collaborated to found Gestalt. (Britannica) Early studies
dealt with
illusion, for example, the Kanizsa triangle,
which we used as the background for many of our pages. As you look at the
Kanisza triangle, a boundary can be seen where the perceived white
triangle
meets the white background; a boundary between white and white!
"The Gestalt psychologists (Koffka, 1935; Köhler, 1940) believed
that a number of innate tendencies influence the way we see. While many
contemporary psychologists maintain that even these tendencies are the
result of experience and learning, all agree that they are strong and
virtually
universal tendencies." (Darley et. al. 114)

David Marr, who thought that
many who investigated
vision were "misled by the apparent simplicity
of the act of seeing,"
approached the matter at a more basic level:
how he recognize lines and
other elements. (Marr 30)

What is the second word, covered by the ink
blot? Our knowledge of roman
letters, and common English words, grammar
and phrases lead many of us
to conclude that the completed sentence reads
the work must get
done. (Less commonly, the blot can also be
interpreted as the impressionistic
silhouette of a donkey, the sentence
reading: the donkey must get
done. However, this perception
appears spontaneously only after years of
wasketball.)
The ability to interpret the blob
as the word 'work' is more
impressive considering how
little of the word we
actually saw . (Gombrich 104)

This ability can mislead as
well. Notice that the image further down
the page which appears to be a
paragraph at first glance but is really
made up of meaningless symbols. We
are fooled because these symbols resemble
roman letters and are grouped
like words.

Since we know that
the planet Saturn has rings, we can infer them from
a photograph of the
planet that the shapes
we see are the rings.

However,
drawings made by the astronomer Hevelius of Saturn, show
that he did not
have rings
"in mind" at the time.

Similarly, Thomas
Harriot's drawings of the moon reflect his ignorance
of its nature.

Humans rely heavily on pre-formed
representations of the world. "A
classical question posed to the
philosopher John Locke by his friend William Molyneux . . .: Would a man
blind from
birth who captured space by touch and movement be able to
sense and interpret
visual space if his sight were suddenly
returned?" (Edelman
41) An interesting case of vision
disability is the story of a man who
had to learn how to see. Blind since
birth, he acquired vision after an
operation. However, he had to learn to
associate this new sensory input
with representations already in his
brain. Without the ability to map visual
perception to named objects with
known functions, the world was a meaningless
blur. Only after he
simultaneously looked at and felt a sculpture was he able to begin
organizing what he saw. The blind man missed the
critical period during
which people with normal
eyesight connect sight and reality. The answer
to Molyneux's question is:
yes he can learn to see, but only very
slowly.